Squad member Cori Bush, who championed payouts faces DOJ probe and taskforces become ‘a national embarrassment’
- The movement for cash reparations is slipping away, say experts and activists
- Efforts have hit roadblocks from California to Detroit and Washington DC
- READ MORE: Backdoor reparations: the US activists getting UN to force payouts
Reparations advocates had the wind in their sails last year.
Cities across the US set up teams to hash out plans to compensate black people for the legacy of slavery, taking their cue from a successful pilot in Evanston, Illinois.
The landscape in 2024 is very different.
Squad member Cori Bush, the Missouri Democrat who has championed payouts, is under investigation for campaign spending violations.
Her bid for a $14 trillion federal compensation package is dead in the water.
The reparations task force in Detroit — a hub for African-American culture — has descended into a ‘shambles’ of quitting and in-fighting.
And California’s black lawmakers this week backtracked on plans to pay $1.2 million to each resident.
While many black voters are keen to get checks in the mail, only a fraction think they’ll see such a day in their lifetimes.
Mike Gonzalez, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said support for reparations peaked amid the protests over the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
Now, it is waning, he added.
‘Like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Critical Race Theory, anti-racism trainings, and other features of the collective hysteria, the call for reparations has begun to fall apart under intense opposition by the American people,’ he told DailyMail.com.
Supporters of reparations say it’s time for America to repay its black residents for the injustices of the historic Transatlantic slave trade, Jim Crow segregation and inequalities that persist to this day.
From there, it gets tricky.
There is no agreed framework for what a scheme would look like. Ideas range from cash payouts to scholarships, land giveaways, business startup loans, housing grants, or statues and street names.
Critics say that payouts to selected black people will inevitably stoke divisions between winners and losers, and raise questions about why American Indians and others don’t get their own handouts.
The pro-reparations movement took a major hit this week with revelations that Bush is being investigated by the DOJ.
The squad member and progressive has spent more than $750,000 on security since she was elected in 2020, including payments to her husband.
She denies any wrongdoing, but faces being booted from Congress if she’s found guilty.
The allegations hurt her signature piece of legislation — a $14 trillion federal package for black Americans to atone for chattel slavery and centuries of racist policies that followed.
The bill was floundering even before her probe over iffy payments.
